Previously published:
The
Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great, click here for details. Also recently published Alexander's Lovers, Andrew Chugg's
previous book for more
details here.

Death
in Babylon

In the Spring of
323BC Alexander the Great ruled an empire stretching from the racing River
Danube in Europe to the ice-bound peaks of the Himalayas in northern India. At
this time he came to visit his capital, the metropolis of Babylon astride the
River Euphrates (Figure 1). Around the middle of May he led a small flotilla
though the marshes to the west of the city in order to plan improvements to the
canal system, which diverted the river's annual spate around the urbanised
districts. The weather was already stiflingly hot and clouds of mosquitoes were
a constant source of irritation.

Figure 1. Babylon

Back in Babylon in
the final week of May, Alexander oversaw the final preparations for an
expedition to circumnavigate Arabia with a fleet of a thousand ships. At a
banquet on the 30th he commemorated the safe completion of the voyage of his
admiral Nearchus from India at the beginning of the previous year. At a late
night party hosted by his companion Medius on the 31st May, Alexander
collapsed when struck by sharp pains in his spine and limb-joints. He was
carried to the bathroom in the royal apartments, where he slept beside the pool,
since he was already feverish. Over the next week the king experienced recurrent
bouts of fever throughout the nights, but accompanied by marked remissions
during daylight hours, enabling the plans for the imminent expedition to
continue to progress. However, the episodes of fever steadily became more
intense and the respites grew ever shorter. By the 5th of June, the
fever, though still more intense at night, persisted throughout daylight hours.
On the 7th June there was a rapid deterioration in Alexander's
condition. For the first time it was clear that his life was in danger. His
senior officers were commanded to gather in the courtyard of the palace, whilst
those of lesser rank were ordered to wait outside its gates. By the 9th
June rumours were flying among the troops that the king had already expired.
They thronged to the palace, where Alexander's companions were forced to allow
them to process past his sickbed (Figure 2). He greeted them with his eyes, for
he had already lost his voice. Perhaps he could still manage a hoarse whisper,
for he is said to have requested that his body should be taken to the god Ammon
in Egypt. He handed his signet ring to Perdiccas, his cavalry commander and
Bodyguard. His companions asked him, "To whom do you leave your kingdom?" and he
replied, "To the strongest," adding that he foresaw great funeral games. When,
finally, Perdiccas asked him at what times he wished his divine honours to be
paid to him, he responded, "When you are happy." These were the last words of
the king.

Figure 2. Alexander's
deathbed

A group of the
companions kept an overnight vigil in the temple of the bull god of the city,
but the shrine's oracle refused their suggestion that Alexander himself could be
brought within its sacred walls. The next day, that is towards evening on the 10th
June 323BC according to the Julian calendar, Alexander was pronounced dead. The
news probably leaked out slowly, but was generally known by the next day,
resulting in wailing and lamentation throughout the city. People went about in a
daze of sorrow, but already a vicious dispute was brewing between the cavalry
and infantry contingents of the army. There was even some fighting in the
palace. Meanwhile Alexander's body remained curiously fresh and lifelike in the
steamy heat for at least several more days, which may indicate a profound
terminal coma.

The symptoms and
circumstances were highly consistent with falciparum malaria, which would have
been contracted through mosquito bites in the marshes. Although a rumour of
poisoning emerged months later, an intermittent fever escalating over nearly two
weeks and terminating in coma is highly inconsistent with any credible poisoning
scenario. However, a certain diagnosis is not possible without testing of
Alexander's remains.

Funeral Games

The cavalry led by
Perdiccas forced the infantry under Meleager to sue for terms within a week by
cutting off supplies to the city. The settlement entailed the acceptance of the
imbecilic Philip Arrhidaeus, the infantry's candidate, as king, but with the
proviso that the yet unborn child of Roxane, Alexander's wife, should also reign
as joint-king, if a boy. Perdiccas was appointed Regent of the Empire and he
immediately contrived the execution of the leaders of the infantry revolt by
having them trampled by war elephants at a parade. The Macedonian army held an
assembly at which they rejected Alexander's plans for further conquests and
sundry expensive temple building projects. They also seem to have agreed that
Alexander's corpse should be conveyed to Egypt in accordance with his expressed
wish.

In the ensuing months
Perdiccas strengthened his grip on power, but Ptolemy, his main surviving rival
at Babylon, departed to take over the governorship of Egypt. Perdiccas was
probably in contact with Olympias, Alexander's mother. She is likely to have
deplored the plan to send her son's body to Egypt and may have insisted that it
should be returned to her. Perdiccas needed her support and was anyway nervous
of putting Alexander's corpse into the hands of Ptolemy. He may have arranged an
augury by his seer, Aristander, to the effect that the nation which kept
Alexander's corpse would never be conquered. This seems to have swayed the
Macedonian Assembly to agree that the body should be sent to Olympias in Macedon
for burial at Aegae, in the cemetery of the Macedonian kings.

Whilst Perdiccas and
the army left Babylon to campaign in Asia Minor, an officer called Arrhidaeus
was left in charge of the construction of a catafalque to carry Alexander's
corpse to its distant tomb. It was over a year before the magnificent funeral
carriage was ready (Figure 3). It set off towards Syria in the second half of
322BC. However, by pre-arrangement with Ptolemy, Arrhidaeus led the procession
south towards Egypt when it reached the vicinity of Damascus, instead of north
towards Macedon. Perdiccas received the news a week or so later and he
immediately sent a contingent of cavalry under his lieutenants Attalus and
Polemon in hot pursuit. They may have overtaken the sluggish catafalque, but
Ptolemy had come north with an army to escort it, so the Regent's men were
repulsed.

Figure 3. Alexander's
catafalque

The furious Perdiccas
attacked Egypt with the Grand Army in the Spring of 321BC. However, he failed
twice to force the crossing of the Nile with tremendous losses among his own
troops. Many were swept away by the river and eaten by crocodiles. The Regent's
own officers assassinated Perdiccas with their spears and offered the Regency to
Ptolemy, who politely refused. Nevertheless he re-supplied the Grand Army and
sent it back north with a couple of his appointees in joint command (one of whom
was Arrhidaeus). Ptolemy himself turned his attention to arranging the
entombment of Alexander at Memphis, then still the capital of Egypt.

The Memphite Tomb of Alexander

The nature and
location of the tomb of Alexander created by Ptolemy at Memphis has been one of
several new aspects of this story researched in detail by Andrew Chugg (See
article in "Greece and Rome"). This new
research reveals a serious candidate for the specific location of the Memphite
tomb for the first time.

It now appears likely
that Ptolemy adapted a vacant tomb that had been prepared by and for the last
native Pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II. However, this Pharaoh had fled south to
Ethiopia, when Egypt had been invaded by the Persians in 343BC, so he never had
the opportunity to occupy his tomb. The site of the prospective tomb was a
chapel within the temple complex of the Serapeum in the cemetery area of ancient
Memphis at Saqqara. It lay at the end of a mile-long avenue of sphinxes. The
Serapeum complex was rediscovered by Auguste Mariette in 1850-1851 by excavating
the sands away from the sphinxes one by one. Guarding the entrance to the chapel
of Nectanebo II, Mariette discovered an incongruous semicircle of life-size
Greek statues of poets and philosophers, which appear to date to the time of
Ptolemy (Figure 4). Some of them can be identified, including Pindar, whose
house and descendants Alexander had saved at Thebes, Homer, who was Alexander's
favourite poet, and Plato, who had been the mentor of Alexander's tutor,
Aristotle. Could these statues have been erected to honour Alexander's tomb?

Figure 4. The
semicircle of statues at the Serapeum in Memphis

Independently,
Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 discovered an ancient Egyptian
sarcophagus in a chapel in the courtyard of the Attarine Mosque in Alexandria
(Figure 5). The local people asserted that this was the tomb of Alexander the
Great. When Napoleon's army was defeated by the British in 1801, Edward Daniel
Clarke shipped the sarcophagus to the British Museum in London and wrote a book
about it, recounting the known history of Alexander's tomb. When hieroglyphics
were deciphered by Champollion in 1822, it was realised that this sarcophagus
was inscribed as the royal sarcophagus of Nectanebo. Originally it was thought
to be that of Nectanebo I, but this was eventually corrected to Nectanebo II. At
the time this was believed to rule out a connection with Alexander, but we can
now see that this is perfectly consistent with the view that Ptolemy took over
Nectanebo's intended tomb at Saqqara. Furthermore, it is known that Alexander's
tomb was moved from Memphis to Alexandria by Ptolemy's son, Philadelphus, which
explains why the sarcophagus turned up in the great Egyptian port city founded
by Alexander.

Figure 5. The
sarcophagus made for Nectanebo II

The Capital of Memory

The exact date at
which Philadelphus transferred Alexander's tomb to the new capital, Alexandria,
which had been founded by Alexander in 331BC, is unknown, but it was most
probably shortly after Ptolemy died in 282BC. No details of the tomb constructed
by Philadelphus have come down to us, but there is a faint possibility that the
magnificent antechamber of a Ptolemaic tumulus tomb found in pieces in the Latin
Cemeteries of modern Alexandria in 1907 is a part of it. This first Alexandrian
tomb was replaced by a magnificent mausoleum at the centre of Alexandria in
about 215BC by the grandson of Philadelphus, Ptolemy Philopator. It was
Philopator's mausoleum, standing within a huge sacred enclosure, known as the
Soma, which was to become the most famous and most sacred shrine of the ancient
world, for in Egypt and the Roman Empire Alexander was worshipped as a god.

In 89BC one of the
later Ptolemies melted down the solid gold coffin, that Diodorus describes as
having been crammed with the richest aromatic spices and fitted to the body like
a mummy case. This Ptolemy used the gold to pay his troops and substituted a
glass coffin for the one he destroyed, but it did him no good, for he was
drowned in a sea-fight with rebel forces within the year.

Shrine of the Caesars

In 48BC Julius Caesar
arrived in Alexandria having pursued his enemy Pompey thither in the aftermath
of his victory at Pharsalus. He was made a present of Pompey's head by the young
Pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, but Caesar deposed and slew him in favour of his sister,
Queen Cleopatra. Caesar also took the opportunity to conduct a pilgrimage to the
tomb of his hero, Alexander, in the tomb chamber carved into the rock beneath
the Soma mausoleum.

After a spectacular
reign, Cleopatra was ultimately defeated and deposed by Octavian (the future
emperor Augustus Caesar) in 30BC. His arrival in Alexandria was the occasion of
the most famous visit to Alexander's tomb. Octavian had the sarcophagus brought
up out of the burial chamber. He crowned the mummy and strewed it with flowers,
but accidentally broke off a piece of its nose.

Figure 6. Caesar
(Augustus?) views Alexander's corpse

A succession of Roman
emperors paid homage to Alexander's corpse in the following centuries. Gaius
Caligula probably saw it, when, aged seven, he accompanied his father,
Germanicus, on a visit to Alexandria in AD19. When he became emperor, he
commanded that Alexander's cuirass be brought from the tomb for use as a prop in
his play-acting. Vespasian and Titus must have seen the tomb in AD69, whilst
Hadrian and Antinous visited the city in AD130. However, the next explicitly
recorded visit is that of Septimius Severus in AD200. This authoritarian emperor
was horrified by the ease of access and commanded that the chamber be sealed.

The last known
imperial visit was that of Severus' son, Caracalla, in AD215. He left his ring
and belt in tribute to Alexander and departed to organise the treacherous and
gory annihilation of most of the young men of Alexandria.

Vanished from History

Towards the middle of
the 3rd century AD, the Roman Empire entered a period of crisis and
near collapse. At first Alexandria was little affected by these troubles, but in
AD262 the local legions supported a rebellion by the governor of Egypt, whom
they declared to be their emperor. The insurrection was brutally repressed.
There was probably fighting in and around Alexandria and parts of the city were
ruined. Less than a decade later, a local magnate by the name of Firmus
supported Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in an attempt to break the eastern provinces
away from the rest of the empire. Once again the rebellion was quashed. This
time the rebels were besieged in the palaces along the eastern shore of the
great harbour. The emperor Aurelian virtually razed this area, then known as the
Bruchion, to the ground. The century ended badly for Alexandria, when yet
another Egyptian rebel emperor was defeated and killed by Diocletian in AD298.
Once again Alexandria was sacked by the imperial army. Some have believed that
Alexander's tomb was destroyed in one of these upheavals, but there is now
compelling evidence that it survived into the 4th century AD.

Ammianus Marcellinus
relates an incident which took place in about AD361. The Patriarch (Christian
Archbishop) Georgius is said to have posed a rhetorical question to the
Alexandrian mob concerning a tall and splendid temple of the Genius of
Alexandria: "How long shall this tomb stand?" he enquired. By "Genius" Ammianus
meant the tutelary deity of the city and this could well mean Alexander.
Certainly, Alexander is the only figure to whom this expression might apply
whose tomb also lay within the city. A few years later in AD365, Alexandria was
struck by a phenomenal earthquake followed by a gigantic tsunami, which is
reported to have wrought havoc in coastal regions and port cities throughout the
eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria is reported to have been particularly hard hit
with ships being lifted onto the roofs of surviving buildings. This is the most
probable occasion of the destruction of the Soma Mausoleum.

A quarter of a
century later, in a newly recognised reference, Libanius of Antioch mentioned in
an oration addressed to the emperor Theodosius that Alexander's corpse was on
display in Alexandria. This would fit with the tomb chamber having eventually
been excavated from beneath the rubble of the ruins. It also provides an
occasion upon which the corpse might have been removed and separated from the
sarcophagus, which would explain why the latter was found in a vacant state by
Napoleon's expedition. A year or so later, Theodosius issued a series of decrees
outlawing the worship of pagan gods, among whom Alexander was to the fore. In
Alexandria, the Christians rioted and destroyed the Serapeum, the leading pagan
temple. This is the point where the continued worship of the founder's corpse
would have become unconscionable to the Alexandrian authorities. This is the
time that Alexander's remains finally disappear from history.

At the very end of
the 4th century or early in the 5th, John Chrysostom was
able to assert in a sermon that Alexander's tomb was then "unknown to his own
people", that is to say, to the pagans of Alexandria. A few decades later Theodoret listed Alexander among famous men whose tombs were unknown.

The Mysteries of the Mosques

There are a couple of
references to a mosque or tomb of Alexander in Arab texts of the 9th
and 10th centuries, but these are likely references to the empty
sarcophagus and the building that housed it. This was probably the Attarine
Mosque, in which the sarcophagus was found in 1798, or at least an antecedent
religious building on the same site, since the mosque seen by Napoleon (Figure
7) was rebuilt from older architectural elements in the 11th century.
A crucial connection is provided by the Braun & Hogenberg map of about 1575,
which depicts a building with a minaret and a small chapel at the location of
the Attarine Mosque (Figure 8). It is significant that the mosque is shown at
the exact centre of the map and the chapel is labelled "Domus Alexandri Magni",
Latin for "House of Alexander the Great". Following his visits to Alexandria in
around 1517, Leo Africanus stated that Alexander's tomb then existed "in a small
house in the form of a chapel". All this tends to confirm that it was the empty
sarcophagus in its chapel that was recognised as Alexander's tomb throughout the
medieval period.

Figure 7. The chapel
of the sarcophagus in the courtyard of the Attarine Mosque

Figure 8. The
"House
of Alexander the Great" at the centre of the Braun & Hogenberg map

After the British
transported the sarcophagus to England in 1802-3, the Attarine Mosque seems to
have decayed rapidly and a few decades later it had disappeared altogether.
However, a new mosque dedicated to Nabi Daniel (i.e. the prophet Daniel) was
constructed by Mohammed Ali in about 1823 a few hundred metres further east at
the foot of the mound of Kom el-Dikka (Figure 9). Seemingly for want of any
alternative focus for tourist interest in Alexander's tomb, in about 1850 one of
the local guides, Ambroise Schilizzi, invented a story that he had seen
Alexander's body in a glass sarcophagus concealed within a secret chamber behind
a worm-eaten door beneath this mosque. Some of the details of the tale betray
its fictional nature. For example, Schilizzi said he saw papyri lying around the
sarcophagus, which is an allusion to a hint by Dio Cassius that the emperor
Septimius Severus sealed up some books of Egyptian magic lore in the tomb.
However, the preservation of papyri is impossible beneath Alexandria, because of
the high water table and capillary action (rising damp).

Figure 9. The Nabi
Daniel Mosque in about 1837

The Location of the Soma

In his article in the
American Journal of Ancient History, Andrew Chugg has proposed a new location for
Alexander's tomb in ancient Alexandria. Zenobius stated that the Soma Mausoleum
lay at the centre of the ancient city, whilst Achilles Tatius mentioned a
district named after Alexander where two grandly colonnaded streets intersected
at right angles. This crossroads lay within an enclosure at the heart of the
city. Similarly, Strabo and Diodorus, who were both eyewitnesses, described
Alexander's tomb as lying within a huge and magnificent walled enclosure and Strabo added that this enclosure was adjacent to the palaces.

Referring to the map
of Alexandria made by Napoleon's expedition in 1798 (Figure 10), it can be seen
that the medieval walls of the city still largely survived as a double circuit
(inner and outer walls) at that time. These walls encompassed an area less than
a third the size of the ancient city in the time of Cleopatra. In the west, the
walls hugged the ancient coastline, as might be expected of a great port city.
However, it the east the walls protruded to surround a vast area a long way back
from the shore and spreading equally either side of the line of the ancient high
street, Canopic Way. When Mahmoud Bey's street plan of the ancient city (Figure
11) is superimposed on the medieval walls, it can be seen that the site of the
ancient principal crossroads lies just within the eastern Rosetta Gate of the
medieval city. Furthermore, the eastern sector of the medieval walls surrounds
this crossroads on three (and a bit) sides. Pococke, who visited Alexandria in
1737, observed that the outer wall of the medieval double circuit appeared to be
ancient in construction. In addition, a water-coloured engraving drawn in about
1792 by Luigi Mayer shows that the outer portal of the Rosetta Gate itself was
ancient in form, having pillars with Corinthian capitals and a statue niche just
to one side (Figure 12). Andrew has therefore proposed that the eastern sector
of the medieval walls incorporated the walls of three sides of the Soma
enclosure and that Alexander's Mausoleum must have been located close to Mahmoud
Bey's central crossroads.

Figure 10. Map of
Alexandria by Napoleon's engineers

Figure 11. Mahmoud
Bey's reconstruction of the ancient street plan

Figure 12. The
Rosetta Gate in 1792

One small section of
the medieval walls, part of a tower at the NE corner of their eastern sector,
survives today in the Shallalat Gardens of modern Alexandria. But the Rosetta
Gate and most of the rest was largely destroyed in the 1820's when Galice Bey
remodelled the old walls into a more modern defensive circuit on behalf of the
Viceroy, Mohammed Ali. In the 1880's most of the remaining walls were swept away
in a phenomenal expansion of the modern city across the ancient ruin field.

Only one existing
ancient, mummified corpse is known to have appeared in central Alexandria at the
end of the 4th century AD, just when Christianity triumphed over the
pagan religions in the city, and Alexander's body mysteriously disappeared. This
was the set of human remains which was said by the Alexandrian church to be the
corpse of St Mark the Evangelist, the founder of Christianity in Alexandria.
However, several ancient Christian writers (Dorotheus, Eutychius and the
Chronicon Paschale) stated that St Mark's body was burnt by the pagans. There is
an apocryphal document known as the "Acts of St Mark", which seems to have been
anonymously composed in 4th century Alexandria and which claims that
a miraculous storm had scared away the pagans and enabled the Christians to
snatch the corpse from the flames. However, this reads like an invention to try
to authenticate a fabricated tomb.

It happens that this
same corpse was subsequently taken from Alexandria, seemingly with the
co-operation of local clergy, after the city had fallen under Arab rule. In
AD828 two merchant-captains smuggled the richly perfumed mummy past the
Alexandrian port officials and sailed back with it to their native city of
Venice. For centuries it lay in a tomb in the crypt beneath the church built to
house it by the Venetians, the Basilica of St Mark (Figure 13). However, the
remains were transferred to a marble sarcophagus beneath the high altar in 1811
to protect them from the ever-increasing risk of damage through flooding of St
Mark's square.

Figure 13. The
Basilica of St Mark in Venice

Scientific testing
should readily reveal the secret of the origins of these remains. Radiocarbon
dating should establish whether they are old enough to be the body of Alexander.
Facial reconstruction should be possible using the skull and the bones could be
inspected to seek signs of Alexander's many wounds, particularly the arrow wound
to his chest, which is said to have lodged in the breast bone. The end of this
story is still unknown and cannot yet be told. We will keep our visitors updated
on our News page.